In recent years, municipalities have been forced to accommodate rapidly growing wastewater volumes associated with heavy urban development in an increasingly stringent regulatory environment. In particular, regulatory entities have focused on the collection system. The goal is to eliminate discharges of raw sewage to the municipality's streams. These discharges result from collection system overflows and treatment facility bypasses.
As a result of increased volume and increased regulation, municipalities are initiating major improvements to their wastewater systems. They are expending significant financial resources on personnel and assistance to address the definition, the analysis, and the solutions of waste water collection system problems. These improvement programs, estimated to cost in the billions, may be anticipated to include the replacement of treatment facilities, new and/or expanded treatment plants, existing collection system upgrades, and major collection system diversion projects. It inevitably happens that, as a program progresses, changes occur in the area's growth rates and land use. At the same time, it is likely that state regulatory bodies will continue to change water quality standards. The combination of these changes in the growth rate and effluent input and the output standards substantially impact a municipality's improvement programs.
As implemented in present practice, predicting, analyzing, and evaluating responses on a wastewater collection system to a variety of external stimuli, as well as to system modifications and to varying system operating characteristics, is a relatively slow and cumbersome activity. This time-consuming activity is aggravated by the necessity for the everyday planning, scheduling, and monitoring of systems maintenance and the generation of administrative reports. The present practice utilizes extensive manual storage of data and calculation.
In present practice, isolated special purpose computer application programs may be utilized to address specific tasks involved in the prediction, analysis, evaluation, and control processes. For example, spread sheet or database programs exist to be used for data organization. Computer based work order, maintenance scheduling, and maintenance history systems exist to store maintenance data and to issue work orders and maintenance reports. Special application programs exist to model a waste treatment facility, for example, for predicting output parameters into the stream system from given input parameters, and for calculating capacities and overloads. However, utilization of each program requires the extensive manual preparation and manipulation of input data. Therefore, notwithstanding the possible use of these special purpose computer applications programs, the steps in the total management process still require extensive manual effort, both in the steps themselves and in interfacing the manual data information and computer based analytical steps.
The process is not only slow but it is exposed to human error. Furthermore, accomplishing the process requires a high level of skill and judgment. The labor and time intensive nature of the job necessitates that system managers employ outside expertise and/or large in-house staffs. Importantly, the number of scenarios for which a wastewater collection system response can be evaluated is, practically speaking, quite limited by time and manpower constraints.
The use of computers for simulations, modeling, analysis, and systems control in certain areas of industry is known. In the public sector, there is known to exist a system for modeling and analyzing the effect of existing and proposed developments upon "flood control systems". The present system, however, is the kind to apply a systems approach to the management of a wastewater collection system.
The present invention recognizes the need for a unitary computerized management system to permit the centralized and uniform management and control of a wastewater collection system. The present invention accomplishes this goal by encompassing a database including wastewater system parameters and analytical models that, by aid of computer, may be used to predict the response of an actual, or of a proposed, wastewater collection system to a municipality's actual, or forecast, wastewater collection needs. In addition, the invention accomplishes the goal by interfacing with existing computer aided programs to generate administrative reports for utilization by public works department personnel in the management of the maintenance of the wastewater collection system. The present invention presents a systems development approach to the solution of this complex problem, resulting in a computerized management system that can significantly enhance a city's in-house ability to predict collection system needs, evaluate the effectiveness of proposed improvements to solve collection system problems, better direct and control consultant's work efforts, and manage wastewater system expenditures. The invention provides a uniform methodology to be applied system wide for planning and analysis and permits an ongoing planning process to predict, on a timely basis, wastewater facility needs to meet changing regulatory requirements.